Silicon Valley’s Man in Washington

On Monday, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump picked Ohio Senator J.D. Vance as his running mate, ending months of speculation and sending a message about governance and politics to the country. 

The elevation of Vance, a far-right demagogue, is correctly seen as an ideological escalation from Trump coming the same day he pledged to call for unity after an apparent assassination attempt came an inch away from killing him. Vance has spouted extremist bigotry throughout his career, from Islamophobia to outright white nationalism, all in the service of his own naked ambition.

But Vance is more than a sign of Trump’s unbowed reactionary politics. He’s tightly aligned with a rising tide of far-right politics in the tech world that is having its moment in the sun during this week’s Republican National Convention in Milwaukee. A close ally of far-right Silicon Valley investor Peter Thiel — the two are co-investors in Rumble, a conservative YouTube alternative — Vance is intimately tied to the rising tech conservative movement I detail in my upcoming book “Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left.” 

After the assassination attempt, Elon Musk and Bill Ackman, both formerly self-declared “apolitical” tech billionaires turned reactionaries, declared their fervent support for Trump. Musk went so far as to pledge $45 million a month to a Trump-supporting Super PAC, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday, and he’s not alone. Joe Lonsdale, who co-founded Palantir alongside Thiel, and tech investors the Winklevoss twins are joining Musk in funding America PAC. Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, founders of the investing firm Andreessen-Horowitz, will also support pro-Trump PACs.

These donations speak to an ongoing shift in how tech leaders are becoming more and more open about their conservative politics. Tech billionaire David Sacks spoke at the RNC on Monday night. His speech wasn’t memorable. Despite a built-in audience for his podcast “All-In,” where he talks with other members of the so-called PayPal Mafia about their investments and politics, the GOP crowd at the RNC wasn’t exactly enthused by tired arguments about taxes and Ukraine. 

No matter. Sacks may want desperately to become a new media celebrity, but failing that, he’ll take mogul. (Full disclosure: I took a paid deal to produce podcasts on his short-lived CallIn platform from 2021 to 2022.) The billionaire has made little secret of the kind of political and media disruption he and his fellow tech titans want to bring about. 

Silicon Valley influence has pushed a right-wing agenda that uses aspects of social conservatism and an isolationist foreign policy to drive its central agenda: deregulation, matched with continued federal investment and support of their technologies and companies. It’s blatantly self-serving politics that serves to increase the wealth and power of the already obscenely wealthy. 

That’s not too different from the agenda of the GOP and, if we’re being honest, the agenda of much of the Democratic Party as well. For decades, right-wing politicians have embraced the opportunity offered by distracting their base with shiny objects of culture war rage as they pursue brutal economic policies at home and imperial ones abroad. It’s no wonder that Silicon Valley is along for the ride. The only thing that has substantially changed from the tech industry of 20 years ago is how open about the whole thing they’re willing to be.

Since before the Bush era, Silicon Valley has relied on the largesse and support of the federal government to make its money. Fat government contracts during the heyday of the “war on terror” led to riches beyond imagining for the likes of Thiel and Musk. But with that wealth came a radicalization of politics that understood social spending and taxes as unfair penalties on their meritocratic success. With the exception of Thiel, who was already radicalized to the extreme right, the richer Silicon Valley got, the more right-wing it got — and the facade of liberalism just melted away.

Today, tech billionaires are pulling levers behind the scenes, and increasingly publicly, to get their agenda on the Republican ticket. What has historically been seen and outwardly promoted as a community of liberal, free-market loving techno optimists is now being revealed as a conservative and reactionary industry similar to Wall Street. These billionaires are not only major players in right-wing media, funding it both overtly and covertly. They have also cultivated a stable of political and media talent (including Vance) who are poised to take more control of the U.S. conservative movement. 

By elevating Vance to the presidential ticket and signaling their intentions to use their vast resources to support Trump, those in the Silicon Valley conservative movement are making a big bet on the Republican Party. At the moment, given how the incumbent Democratic is polling, it seems like a relatively safe one. If it pays off, it will pay off big, bringing ultra-wealthy right-wing industrialists closer than ever to the levers of power. That’s something that should give us all pause.